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[17:48:31] <Roguish> SWPadnos: hey, is there any major advantage of a Mesanet 5i23 (400k spartan 3) over the 5i20 (200k spartan 2) in the near emc2 future?
[17:48:53] <SWPadnos> I don't see one. what's the cost of the 5i23?
[17:49:58] <Roguish> 5i23 > 229
[17:50:03] <Roguish> 5i20 > 199
[17:50:11] <SWPadnos> ok - not too much more money.
[17:50:29] <SWPadnos> it could sure be made to work, but I don't think any of the guys have one
[17:50:39] <Roguish> newer, faster, smaller, whiter and brighter?
[17:50:49] <SWPadnos> sort of, until you look at the 5i22 ;)
[17:51:02] <SWPadnos> but that's much more expensive (and 1.0 or 1.5M gates)
[17:51:12] <Roguish> but that's lots more $
[17:51:39] <Roguish> i want to put together 6 axis system.
[17:52:04] <SWPadnos> then you really want a 5i22 - you can do 8 axes and still have 48 I/Os on one card
[17:52:21] <Roguish> emc2 drivers yet? or soon?
[17:52:46] <SWPadnos> soon-ish :)
[17:53:03] <SWPadnos> the config loader already recognizes the 5i22 cards
[17:53:28] <SWPadnos> but making an old-style driver for it wouldn't be a great use of time at this point
[17:53:31] <Roguish> will it load the 5i20 code so i can use it now as a 5i20?
[17:53:52] <SWPadnos> no
[17:54:08] <SWPadnos> the bitfiles would be different, even for a config that just used 3 connectors
[17:55:04] <Roguish> well, not being a vhdl programmer, i'm looking for a way to get started now and i have a 5i20 card already.
[17:55:39] <Roguish> if i add another 5i20, i'm up to 8 axes.
[17:55:46] <SWPadnos> ok - you can certainly use the 5i20 (or maybe even two) for now, I'm not sure when the newer stuff will be added
[17:56:16] <SWPadnos> have you tried using two 5i20s in one machine?
[17:56:28] <Roguish> no, not yet.
[17:56:41] <Roguish> should that be a challange?
[17:56:46] <alex_joni> it should work up to 4 boards
[17:56:54] <SWPadnos> shouldn't be, but I don't know that it's been tested yet
[17:56:57] <Roguish> Ciao, dude.
[17:57:02] <alex_joni> hi Roguish
[17:58:04] <Roguish> guess i'll find out. think i'll drive over to mesa and pick up another 5i20, unless someone has one they want to sell cheap.
[17:58:35] <SWPadnos> I've got 3 that I can test with, but I'm not sure I want to sell them cheap :)
[17:59:37] <Roguish> what do you think of their compact flash to ide adapters?
[18:00:06] <SWPadnos> CF to IDE is commonplace
[18:00:16] <Roguish> stuff the os and all onto a 4g cf unit?
[18:00:26] <Roguish> a diskless system.
[18:00:52] <Roguish> all swap file work in ram?
[18:01:17] <SWPadnos> I configured a few machines that have no swap, using 8GB SSD drives
[18:01:37] <Roguish> no swap? lots of read/writes?
[18:01:38] <SWPadnos> they could easily use 4GB - there's that much left over, and these have all the development stuff on them
[18:01:59] <SWPadnos> well, it's not running EMC per se - it's a HAL application, no X, read-only filesystem, etc.
[18:05:19] <alex_joni> in theory you should just copy the live cd iso to a CF
[18:05:27] <alex_joni> that sets up most you'll need
[18:05:38] <Roguish> just had firefox poop. back on now.
[18:05:54] <alex_joni> maybe with a different partition for home
[18:07:47] <Roguish> Office Max has a 4g on sale for $25, think i do that and see how it goes.
[18:08:08] <Roguish> 8g for $48.
[18:16:36] <Roguish> alex_jone and SWPadnos, thanks for the info.